15 Important Things You Can Learn About Your Audience From Social Listening

Social media and social networking comprise the present revolution of online interaction, eclipsing email and other tools as people’s default means of communication.

With staggering amounts of information being sent in the form of discussions, social cues, and other online interactions, participation is absolutely necessary for entrepreneurs to keep up and stay relevant. But in order to participate effectively with your target audience, to gather information and filter out what’s really important, you must listen to what they have to say.

Social listening tools play an important role in helping you market your brand by letting you know the following key information:

1. Where People Are Active

Tools for social listening allow you to categorize online mentions, enabling you to see what proportion of your audience published content on various social media platforms.

You can then initiate conversation with them and accumulate resources for marketing on these platforms. By knowing where people spend their time and energy, you will know where to spend yours.

2. Trend Identification

Social listening tools allow you to pinpoint keywords, esoteric terms, and phrases for you to relate to your consumers because knowing what people say about your products allows you to get in on the conversation, and even get ahead of it.

By coming to understand associated conversations, you will also gain insight from your audience’s overall impression about the entire range of products in your market, including those produced by your competition.

3. Influencer Identification

Identifying the influencers among your audience allows you to relate with your audience, and turn them into influencers in your favor. Gain rapport and learn about what matters to them. By establishing a relationship with these key players, they will use their influence to help you establish your brand.

4. How Your Brand Is Perceived

Your brand could target the high-end market if you wanted, but are you sure everyone sees it that way, too? Social listening tools determine whether your marketing messages are actually making headway with your audience.

By analyzing and categorizing their mentions of your brand into positive and negative sentiments, you’ll know whether you’ve positioned your brand to target the right market.

5. Discover Most Common Pain Points

For new brands, troubleshooting their products’ problem areas is crucial. Using the social listening tools to isolate the conversations about these areas for improvement, you can improve and repair your product, brand and reputation.

6. Level The Playing Field

Wondering what your competition is thinking, or what they’re up to? Feed industry-relevant keywords into your social listening tool.

That way, you will have all of the conversations that are available to the public at your fingertips. You will be able to see what advantages your competition is using, and how people feel about this new technology. Use this knowledge to bring yourself up to their level.

7. What Qualities Are Important For Them In Products

Customer insights about products are everywhere, seen in customer reviews, opinion and preference polls, as well as brand perception discussions. Through in-depth analysis, social listening tools provide details on what customers feel are the most important qualities of the products they buy, intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influence their purchases, and also the critical qualities that make a brand stand above the competition.

8. What Customers Like About Products

Marketing strategy is important, and so is how you focus your strategy to accommodate your customers’ preferences. By knowing the triggers that are most influential in their purchase decisions, you can emphasize the selling points for your products, and your products will move even faster.

9. How To Develop Better Products

In line with discovering the most common pain points, social listening also allows customers the chance to be heard when voicing their concerns about how to make a product better. When customers feel like they are being heard, you are more likely to retain them as customers, instead of losing them to the competition.

10. Content Ideas

Social listening distills Internet noise into practical information, which you can use to develop content that directly addresses your customers’ problems and questions. For example, if a majority of users are unaware about how to use a new feature of your latest product, you can implement the answer in your content strategy.

11. How They Engage With Content

Does your audience engage in lively or even heated discussion about your brand or industry, or are they more likely to click “Like” and be done with it? Social listening helps you to gauge your audience’s collective outspokenness, and avoid inappropriate or unnecessary engagement of your audience, keeping you on the safe side.

12. Context In Which Users Write About You

Sometimes, online conversations contain ideas that require contextualization, especially when polarizing viewpoints come to light. Social listening tools help to put your audience’s thoughts in context, allowing you to see the bigger picture.

13. Understanding Your Data Source

Data that does not represent your audience, or is otherwise misleading, can do more harm than good. It is important to know for certain whether your sources are authentic, and that the data coming from the channels you’ve selected matches up with the demographics of your customers.

14. Improve Agility

Agility in social media refers to your reaction time when addressing an issue, whether it is positive feedback, a complaint, or a neutral mention. As mentioned above, customers like being listened to, and your ability to respond to their concerns swiftly can immensely help you build a positive brand image. Social listening tools help you stay in the loop.

15. Social Recruiting

Social listening tools have particular hidden value in discovering talent – not just influencers, but also key experts, marketers and technicians who can help you build your brand with a fresh perspective.

Chances are your social listening tools are working wonders for you, so let us know. Share your experiences and comment below.